10 Ways for Accessing Zoho Apps

Zoho offers the most comprehensive and growing set of web applications for both personal and business needs. With so many applications around, it can become a little difficult on your part to access the different Zoho apps, as Zoho has multiple entry (login) points. Let's see if we can make this a bit easy for you by listing out ways of how to easily access the various apps.

1.  If you login at http://zoho.com, you will either land up inside Zoho Personal or Zoho Business depending on the type of your Zoho account. Zoho Personal & Business follow the same approach, having a navigation tree at the left. And you can keep switching to the specific app you want.

There are a couple of benefits that Zoho Personal/Business offers. You can re-arrange the left hand panel so that the most used apps by you are always at the top (click on Settings -> Applications & drag-drop the apps as per the order you like them). And you can add other Zoho apps too to the list (say Zoho Planner, Projects or CRM). What's more, you can add third-party apps too that you frequently use (say, Google Reader or Bloglines for reading your feeds).

2.  Let's say you are a data aficionado and use Zoho Sheet a lot. You probably login to Zoho Sheet directly at http://sheet.zoho.com. And while working with a spreadsheet there, you want to embed a chart in a Zoho Show slide show that you are preparing to show to your management. Easy way is to click on the Switch To at the top and choose Zoho Show in the drop-down menu that appears. Look for the 'Switch To' menu in other Zoho apps as well.

3. Supposing you are a heavy user of the office type of applications alone - Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show (for word processing, spreadsheets & presentations respectively), you will mostly be comfortable living inside Zoho Docs (http://docs.zoho.com), only visiting the respective service URLs for a few specific uses occassionally.

4. You can put to good use the browser bookmarks. For example, I have Zoho Mail, Zoho Writer & Zoho CRM, the apps that I most frequent on my Firefox Bookmarks toolbar.

5. One of Zoho Personal/Business 's left panel listing is the Desktop. You can make this as your landing page (the default setting is Mail) once you login to Zoho. This will give you an overall view of your calendar, to-dos, office files, notes etc.

6. Login to your Zoho account. Now open http://zoho.com in a new tab. You have links to all the Zoho apps. Except Zoho CRM and a few utilities, you can directly login to the app you want as Zoho supports single sign-on.

7. Hit https://accounts.zoho.com. It has all the Zoho apps under single sign-on listed there. Right-click and choose 'Open Link in New Tab' for each of the apps you want to work on.

8. You can create desktop shortcuts for the Zoho apps you frequently use if you are on Google Chrome or Mozilla Prism. I use Prism at times to access Zoho Writer when the whole screen real estate with minimum distractions is the need of the hour. Haven't tried this out for Chrome yet.

9. Want to access Zoho on your mobile phone? Currently optimized for the iPhone and Windows Mobile, apps available are Zoho Mail, Writer, Sheet, Show & Creator.

10. Many of Zoho's apps have a rich set of APIs. You can access data stored in Zoho (Data API) or use Zoho's functional interface (Remote API) from within your web application.

Now, the above's not a comprehensive list and you should be having your own way of accessing Zoho everyday. What are your favorite Zoho apps? How do you access them regularly and what's your favorite way of doing it? Let us hear it in the comments.

ps : We are coming up with yet another way to make the accessibility easier. Wanna take a guess of what we are going to come up with? ;)

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